Repository:
Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.

Language:
English.

Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

None.

Publication Rights

Property rights reside with the repository. Literary rights reside with the creators of the documents or their heirs. To obtain
permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Public Services Librarian of the Dept. of Special Collections.

Charlotte Painter was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1926. She received her Bachelors Degree in Theater from Louisiana
State University in 1947. From 1956 to 1960, she rose to Senior Editor at The Macmillan Publishing Company in New York. Having
received a Masters of Arts in English from Stanford in 1965, Painter taught creative writing at Stanford until 1969, and at
the University of Califonia, at Berkeley, at Davis, and at Santa Cruz in the 1960s and early 1970s. From 1975, she taught
intermittantly at San Francisco State University until she received tenure in 1988. She retired in the Spring of 1991.

Painter's first short story appeared in
The New Yorker in 1955. She finished her first novel,
The Fortunes of Laurie Breaux, in 1961, and subsequently, won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Stanford Creative Writing Program for the academic year
1961-1962. After completing her fellowship, she left California to join her husband Thomas Earl Voorhees (M.A. in Anthropology
from Stanford) in Nashville, Tennessee where Voorhees taught at Vanderbilt University. Painter survived the isolation of being
pregnant in an unfamiliar city by keeping a diary which she published in 1965 as
Who Made the Lamb. The summer after Painter and Voorhees left Nashville, in June 1963, Voorhees drowned, leaving Painter a widow and a single
mother of an infant son.

With the support of subsequent fellowships, Painter pursued her writing vigorously after her husband's death. She published
Who Made the Lamb in 1965,
Confessions from the Malaga Madhouse in 1971,
Revelations: Diaries of Women in 1975,
Seeing Things in 1976, numerous shortstories and poems, and
Gifts of Age in 1985.

Her books addressed the issues closest to her heart: motherhood and women's struggle between the isolation of traditional
female roles and the loneliness of the fight for social equality. Painter advocated the autobiography, and its preliminary
form, the diary, as a means by which to illuminate the universal secrets of life. In 1965, Painter shared her own diary. Then,
she and Mary Jane Moffat paid tribute to the literary genre of the diary with
Revelations: Diaries of Women in 1974 for revealing the long neglected histories of women.

Painter's work reflects West Coast literary world of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged the publishing establishment of
New York City. In her interview with Joan Henriksen, she dismissed the New York publishers as far behind everything that's
the best in writing today. (
St.Louis Dispatch, November 28, 1971.)

Painter's work, nevertheless, withstood the tests of time. In the 1980s,
Seeing Things and
Who Made the Lamb were republished. As she wrote in the foreword of the 1988 edition of
Who Made the Lamb, many of the issues raised in the 1960s, like single motherhood, abortion, and women's right to equality, still challange American
society decades later.

Scope Note

The Charlotte Painter papers, including manuscripts, reviews of her books and correspondence, are arranged around the publication
of her major works, preserving her own organization. A bibliography of Painter's work has been included at the beginning of
this guide. An alphabetical list of correspondents follows the list of correspondents so that letters may be located easily
within this collection.

Series I includes Painter's own professional files, maintained in the same order in which she presented them to the Library.
Box 1, folders 1-6 contain the files which Painter prepared for her application for tenure at San Francisco State University.
The remaining folders contain additional material pertaining to her career as a writer and educator. Material about her lectures
and reviews of others may be found in this series as well. Where duplicate sets of files existed, they were discarded; however,
if they had distinguishing notes, they were filed with their match.

Series II, the heart of the collection, is organized by each of her major book titles in the order in which they were published.
For each title, except
Revelations; Diaries of Women (for which papers are limited), there are folders for: correspondence relating to that work; reviews of and promotions for
that publication; Royalty Statements (if available); and Painter's notes. The manuscripts and galley proofs are stored separately
in oversized manuscript boxes. Occasionally, extensive correspondence with one individual is grouped separately to preserve
the integrity of that relationship, but otherwise the letters are arranged chronologically. Refer to the
List of Correspondents to identify the placement of specific letters.

Series III is comprised of material relating to Painter's short stories, her unpublished works, her essays, her speaking engagements,
as well as miscellaneous correspondence that does not pertain directly to a particular work.

Series IV contains 20 audio cassettes of Charlotte Painter's interviews with the women she included in
Gifts of Age. Refer to the guide to identify the location of a particular interview. A video of Joan Merrill's interview of Charlotte Painter
and Mary Jane Moffat, co-authors of
Revelations: Diaries of Women, is also included.

Finally, in Series V, some of Painter's manuscripts and galley proofs are stored in an Oversized Boxes 5-11.